That's my JAMstack
Bryan Robinson
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Raymond Camden (REMIX) on the amazing expansion of the Jamstack ecosystem and how far we've come
Quick show notes Our Guest: Raymond Camden What he'd like for you to see: His New Jamstack book with Brian Rinaldi His musical Jam: Pink Martini Transcript Bryan Robinson 0:14 Welcome, everyone to another episode of That's My Jamstack the podcast where we ask that amazingly complex question. What's your jam and the Jamstack? This week, we've got another That's My Jamstack REMIX! Going all the way back to season one, episode two, we're catching up with the amazingly prolific Jamstack author Raymond Camden. Raymond is a senior DevRel at Adobe, a Star Wars nerd, and a web and serverless hacker. Bryan Robinson 0:55 Hey, Raymond, thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Raymond Camden 0:57 Thank you so much for having me. Bryan Robinson 0:59 All right. So for longtime listeners of the show, I mean, like the longest time listeners of the show, they might recognize that Raymond has been on before, but it was legitimately two years ago, more than two years ago, and it was the second episode. And I think we're both older and wiser since then. And there might be folks that haven't listened to the entire archive of That's My Jamstack. So why don't you give everyone a refresher on who you are, what you do for work and what you do for fun? Raymond Camden 1:26 Absolutely. So yeah, first off, I'm definitely older. I'm not quite sure about Weiser. Give me 30 or 40 more years from that. So hi, everyone. I am Raymond Camden. I'm actually not sure what company I was at two years ago, probably two or three different ones. Bryan Robinson 1:45 You weren't allowed to say is actually what you had yet people go to your LinkedIn. Raymond Camden 1:49 yeah. That was American Express. They were antsy about, you can't see where you work. Yeah, I was American Express. And I'm not there anymore. So yes, I am currently at Adobe, I am a developer evangelist, I am working on the document services team. So we have API's that work in PDS. So like a concrete example of that is you let people upload PDFs and you want a consistent way to render it in the browser. And we have a free tool for that. You want to do some stuff on the server side. So you want to like OCR to PDF, or maybe cut it in half, or add something to finance, slice and dice PDFs, basically. So we have sort of API's that work with PDF, but that work with PDFs, and we have a PDF viewer for the web as well. And that's the team that I'm on. That's what I do for work. And it's got to find as well. But for fun. I am a big video game player, so as my wife so. And even better. She's a big PC Gamer, so she'll game on her laptop while I take away the TV from my console. So again, like that works Bryan Robinson 3:00 Best of both worlds. What? What games are you playing right now? Raymond Camden 3:06 When I'm not playing with my friends, every Friday night, we call it bowling league, we hang out and play Call of Duty. We just switched to Vanguard. But outside of that, and when I'm by playing solo, I currently am playing Far Cry six, which is pretty cool. I pretty much like only do multiplayer stuff on Friday nights. Because when you have kids, it's hard to do anything multiplayer, because there's no pause that all Bryan Robinson 3:35 that pause button is so important with kids. Raymond Camden 3:37 Oh, yeah. Bryan Robinson 3:38 Yeah. So cool. So you're doing some cool PDF stuff with with Adobe. But you're also probably one of the more prolific writers in at least in the Jamstack space, but like you do quite a bit of writing too, right? Raymond Camden 3:52 I do too much writing. been blogging since 2003 or so. And I try to blog about once a week. I did a lot more in the early days. But I also started before Twitter, you know, and so Twitter as bad as it is, you know, Twitter's great for short things like, Hey, you wrote a cool article, here's the link. And the old days, you know, there wasn't that. So on my blog, I would just quickly share stuff like that. So I look at my stats, there was one year right at about I think 800 blog posts, which is stupid. The last couple of years, it's a bit more reasonable. So I'm approaching 74 This year, so I definitely hit my one per week average. Bryan Robinson 4:40 Nice. That's I used to go for one a month and I'm not even there. So that is super impressive to me at least. So we talked a little bit last episode, but I want to give a recap. What was your entry point into static sites and the Jamstack? Sure. Raymond Camden 4:55 So I've been around for a very long time to I started web development and 93 year 94 or so, you know, back when there wasn't any defined roles, like you did everything. And I quickly found out that while I could do HTML, no problem, making things pretty was not my forte. So I got really involved in Perl, CGI scripts, and just the dynamic web, which back then, even though we had JavaScript, it quickly became really crappy. On the front end, so the back end really became the place to do anything dynamic. It's been a very long time in the ColdFusion community, which is in law was, you know, a great product, you know, it wasn't open source, and a lot of people look down on it. But it was very practical. It made hard things easy back, when there wasn't a lot of solutions out there that would do that. But yeah, you know, 1015 years to everything, and ColdFusion, and a database and a web server, and that was my jam for a long time. And it kind of two things happen at once. The front end began to get less crappy, like, shockingly, less crappy. And, you know, I always knew JavaScript, but you know, there wasn't much that you could do with it. And all of a sudden, you could start doing really good things. And so like that happened. And I began to realize that I was using a lot of power for websites that probably didn't need it. And I ran across a tool called hark js, which is still around, but I don't think it's been updated for a while. But it was my first introduction to the idea of a static site generator. And I, you know, sort of played with it and just clicked, it was like, oh, okay, it could be dynamic locally, but like, when I'm done with just files, and like, nothing can can crash, nothing could go wrong, nothing could be hacked. So like, I took a couple of my old ColdFusion websites, where, you know, they were database driven. And I recognized, you know, I haven't edited the database in like months. And I began to have to convert them to static and almost like, this is the best thing ever. And this began to do more and more with it. And it really kind of clicked for me. Bryan Robinson 7:20 So out of curiosity, and I don't know if we talked about this last time or not, but you're primarily a back end person from back in the day. And I found not always, but often back in people like servers, they they enjoy working on the server, not me personally, not back in person. But it's interesting that you made this transition to something that is not at all, like, you can host it on any server anywhere. It's just HTML, it's just whatever. But I guess, was it the simplification of the workflow that drew you to it? Or was it something different, as a back end guy coming in? Raymond Camden 8:00 It definitely the simplification. I mean, while I can appreciate the power of something like ColdFusion, or PHP, even, not having to worry about it breaking live was was huge. And doing more in JavaScript, you know, that doesn't need a server, you do have to worry about browsers. But you know, in general, browsers have a good level support for nearly everything that I want to do. You know, ignoring a certain mobile browser from a company in California, but even that does the basic stuff. Okay. Bryan Robinson 8:35 Yeah, exactly. We won't talk about that. It's fine. So cool. So a lot has changed in two years. It's amazing how much this ecosystem changes on a regular basis. How are you today using the Jamstack both professionally and personally and maybe like a slight comparison to maybe how you were using it two years ago? Raymond Camden 8:57 Well, for one, it's definitely nice to see the the ecosystem and not just in API's, but in companies like Netlify and their competitors providing more and more value out of this just off the box. When I first started I used s3 which was convenient you just FTP the files up and you're good to go. But then we saw tools like search for example, which is something else I don't see a lot of people using but I know it's still there and just command line and live what was just really really great like when I started getting a website up involved calling an ISP and waiting a couple days and then you know maybe you got your website where they you had access to again to copy stuff up. So seeing that ecosystem evolved seeing that the different features and seeing different companies now competing to offer more the most value just makes things great for for me I love the fact that I feel like I have good solutions for for like real science. So like, as an evangelist, I don't do a lot of real work. I make a lot of dumb demos. So I like mentally in my brain. I have a path that I use for like my blog, which is a real site. And then I have like a path for here's a dumb toy. I went online, and I don't care if it's online 10 years from now. Bryan Robinson 10:23 Thanks. And it's interesting to me. You mentioned surge and surge was early on for me as well like a way of getting things live. And I really appreciate it. And that was in the days before, like, honestly, important Netlify came around. And I remember the first couple times I use Netlify and figured out like I don't need I was using CodeShip with Serge as you needed to see ICD to like, have those deploys work well. And it's interesting to me how I think it was Phil Hawksworth said on Twitter, like, the table stakes have changed, right? Like what a company that is planning on doing Jamstack or Jamstack, a Jason stuff has is very differe
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